War memories recalled

Press, 1 March 1982, Page 6

War memories recalled

Fleeing Greece before an advancing German Army is one wartime nursing ence Miss Eva Mackay/ would hate to relive. She has come to Christchurch from Hastings for probably the last national reunion of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, with-one-third of the 602 sisters who served overseas during World War 11. All of the women attending are aged more than 60 and for many it will be their last chance to catch up on events of the last 40 years. Their two-day reunion, which began yesterday with a church service and wreath-laying at the Citizens’ War Memorial, will end this evening with dinner at a hotel near Christchurch Air-, port.

Miss Mackay, now in her 70s. is reluctant to retell her nursing experiences which won her the 0.8. E. and the Royal Red Cross — not because of the memories but because she does not want to detract from the efforts of other sisters who faced, the same hardships in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

She remembers that nothing happened as expected. She sailed from New Zealand in 1940 expecting to arrive in Egypt. Instead the sisters landed in Scotland and set up a hut hospital in Berkshire. It was there that Miss Mackay had a chance to meet Queen Elizabeth, now the Queen Mother, who toured the wards. “When we arrived in England we thought we would be picking flowers in France," she said. But then No. 1 General Hospital staff was sent to Helmeih, Egypt, where tent wards were buried more than a metre deep to protect patients from bombs and sandstorms, which “just about swallowed you." “There were flies, sandstorms, and heat but our job was to nurse the troops and you just put up with it,”

said Miss Mackay. She praised both patients and sisters. With 52 trained staff in a 600-bed hospital the sisters sometimes worked around the clock. All water was boiled on primuses to treat not only the wounded but many cases of infectious hepatitis, . dysentery, and typhoid. “I do not think that you could ever have , staff who were so well disciplined." she said. At one stage the sisters declined two days leave because they did not want to lose touch with patients. It was also a different story when the hospital moved , to Greece. “We thought’we would finish up in Germany with a flag." Instead a call came at 2 a m.

to clear the tent hospital near Mount Olympus within three hours. Taking hardly more than the clothes on their backs, about 50 sisters travelled 12 hours non-stop crammed into trucks to reach Athens in the middle of a bombing raid. Miss Mackay recalls the feeling of helplessness when the bombs started to fall. She was told to get down in the gutter but after one look decided to remain in the car. “It was the wrong thing to do. but I was on my own so I was not setting a bad example." Their hospital ship was bombed and had to leave the harbour, and so the sisters were packed back into trucks for a bone-rattling ride south through Greece to a small

coastal harbour. They ended up sheltering during an air raid behind gravestones in a cemetery before being taken aboard a destroyer bound for Crete.

Back in Egypt in 1943 Miss Mackay was appointed principal matron in charge of staffing hospitals and casualty clearing stations in Italy and Egypt. When the war ended she became matron-in-chief of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service until she retired from the Army in 1954.

Miss Mackay said that she would hate to relive the war years but some good also came out of them. She values the close bond between returned servicewomen and has missed only one Anzac Day dawn parade since the war ended.